2.28.2013

2.27.2013

Tips to lower your risk of divorce

About 50 percent of marriages will end in divorce. This statistic can
make marriage seem like a poor gamble with a high probability of
failure. But are the statistics really that cut-and-dried? Is there
anything we can do to make marriage less risky? Following are several
ways to stack the odds in your favor:
By:
TwoOfUs.org (MCT), INFORUM

About 50 percent of marriages will end in divorce. This statistic can
make marriage seem like a poor gamble with a high probability of
failure. But are the statistics really that cut-and-dried? Is there
anything we can do to make marriage less risky?
Following are several ways to stack the odds in your favor:

Wait until your mid-20s or so to marry.Marrying
young can substantially increase the possibility of getting divorced.
If you don’t think you can wait until age 25 or so to marry, postponing
marriage even a few years can help. (It’s not a rigid cut-off point –
it’s more of a sliding scale.) Note that delaying marriage beyond your
late 20s, however, does not statistically enhance your likelihood of
preventing divorce.

Be aware of broken family dynamics and marriage mindsets.You
are not doomed to repeat your parent’s mistakes. However, children of
divorce are more likely to divorce. Other negative relationship patterns
modeled for you in childhood can seep into your adult relationships.
Commit to understanding any unhealthy expectations or interactions
demonstrated by your parents.

Don’t live together without a clear commitment to marry in the future.Giving
marriage a “trial run” by living together first may seem like the smart
thing to do. But cohabitation – especially without first making a firm
commitment to marry – can actually hurt your chances of staying married
once you tie the knot.

Have a healthy (but not crippling) caution.Many
Americans have swung too far in terms of their pessimism about marriage
. However, it is also dangerous to be too cocky about your ability to
sustain a marriage. A certain amount of caution when approaching
marriage is wise.

Try premarital counseling.The
phrase “premarital counseling” doesn’t conjure up images of fun. But
premarital counseling can reduce your likelihood of divorce by 30
percent. So if you are serious about making your marriage work,
premarital counseling is definitely worth consideration. You might even
enjoy getting to know your partner better through this experience.

Money can’t buy happiness, but ...An
annual income of $50,000 (versus $25,000) can drop your risk of divorce
by 30 percent. Higher income is often tied to higher education levels,
so also try to go to get your college degree before you wed. Even some
college can help. Individuals with some college reduce their risk of
divorce by 13 percent compared to high school dropouts.

Most
of us think of service dogs as a blind person’s companion. But, wonderfully,
man’s best friend has proven to be a powerful partner for people with other
disabilities.

I
know an autistic boy who has his service dog tethered to him 24/7 because the
child runs dangerously away from his home. The dog lays on him when he gets up
suddenly or as he tries to leave the front door, until the proper command is
given.

The
service dog is not a pet. A service dog is intentionally separated from other
dogs to prevent the natural canine pack mentality, which would divorce the dog
from his master. Once the dog has begun to learn and adapt to his role, then “puppy
socializing” begins in small doses – such is the methodical and painstaking
process.

Another
service dog helps a person with multiple daily seizures. The service animal
anticipates a seizure and alerts the owner so that safety precautions can be taken
quickly.

And, more Veterans are
thankfully utilizing service dogs as part of their return from a combat zone.
With hand signals, the animal companion provides emotional support and comfort,
even applying deep pressure therapy (via paws) as owner’s anxiety rises - an
excellent grounding technique.

Service
dogs are highly trained, as is the human, with an average cost of
$10,000 per dog. Some recipients of a service companion personally fund raise for its' purchase, then wait
patiently for the perfect dog, one that matches their exact needs and temperament. The two are trained together, in unison. It is a lengthy and complex process.

For
many persons, walking around with a service dog is an “outing” that feels
embarrassing and uncomfortable, “people will know." The service dog experience in itself can be an
emotional and challenging time, until the comfortability catches up with the
relief and assistance the dog can ultimately provide.

Service
dogs have categories as well and can be referred to as Medical Alert Dogs,
Psychiatric Service Dogs or Emotional Support Dogs.

Do not to ask to pet the dog. The human/companion dyad are a symbiotic pair, sharing 24 hours,
7 days a week together. View the animal is aphysical and mental extension of the person.

Volunteer Work Days at New Roots Community Farm

The IRC New Roots Community Farm Saturday Work Party!

The IRC New Roots Community Farm provides growing space for 80 families
in the City Heights area. Many of the participants were farmers in
their home countries and this is their first opportunity to grow crops
in the United States. We need your help to take care of the common
areas of the farm.

The work days take place on the 2nd or 3rd Saturday of the month.

Space is limited to 30 people. Large groups should contact Priya.Reddy@Rescue.org to inquire about participating. You need not fill out a volunteer application for this one day volunteer opportunity.

Photo Gallery (1/14)

When Time magazine selected the British artist Banksy—graffiti master, painter, activist, filmmaker and all-purpose provocateur—for
its list of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2010, he found
himself in the company of Barack Obama, Steve Jobs and Lady Gaga. He
supplied a picture of himself with a paper bag (recyclable, naturally)
over his head. Most of his fans don’t really want to know who
he is (and have loudly protested Fleet Street attempts to unmask him).
But they do want to follow his upward tra­jectory from the outlaw
spraying—or, as the argot has it, “bombing”—walls in Bristol, England,
during the 1990s to the artist whose work commands hundreds of thousands
of dollars in the auction houses of Britain and America. Today, he
has bombed cities from Vienna to San Francisco, Barcelona to Paris and
Detroit. And he has moved from graffiti on gritty urban walls to paint
on canvas, conceptual sculpture and even film, with the guileful
documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, which was nominated for an Academy Award.
Pest Control, the tongue-in-cheek-titled organization set up by the
artist to authenticate the real Banksy artwork, also protects him from
prying outsiders. Hiding behind a paper bag, or, more commonly, e-mail,
Banksy relentlessly controls his own narrative. His last face-to-face
interview took place in 2003.
While he may shelter behind a concealed identity, he advocates a
direct connection between an artist and his constituency. “There’s a
whole new audience out there, and it’s never been easier to sell
[one’s art],” Banksy has maintained. “You don’t have to go to college,
drag ’round a portfolio, mail off transparencies to snooty galleries or
sleep with someone powerful, all you need now is a few ideas and a
broadband connection. This is the first time the essentially bourgeois
world of art has belonged to the people. We need to make it count.”

***

The Barton Hill district of Bristol in the 1980s was a scary part of
town. Very white—probably no more than three black families had somehow
ended up there—working-class, run-down and unwelcoming to strangers. So
when Banksy, who came from a much leafier part of town, decided to go
make his first foray there, he was nervous. “My dad was badly beaten up
there as a kid,” he told fellow graffiti artist and author Felix Braun.
He was trying out names at the time, sometimes signing himself Robin
Banx, although this soon evolved into Banksy. The shortened moniker may
have demonstrated less of the gangsters’ “robbing banks” cachet, but it
was more memorable—and easier to write on a wall.
Around this time, he also settled on his distinctive stencil approach
to graffiti. When he was 18, he once wrote, he was painting a train
with a gang of mates when the British Transport Police showed up and
everyone ran. “The rest of my mates made it to the car,” Banksy
recalled, “and disappeared so I spent over an hour hidden under a dumper
truck with engine oil leaking all over me. As I lay there listening to
the cops on the tracks, I realized I had to cut my painting time in half
or give it up altogether. I was staring straight up at the stenciled
plate on the bottom of the fuel tank when I realized I could just copy
that style and make each letter three feet high.” But he also told his
friend, author Tristan Manco: “As soon as I cut my first stencil I could
feel the power there. I also like the political edge. All graffiti is
low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history. They’ve been used
to start revolutions and to stop wars.”
The people—and the apes and rats—he drew in these early days have a
strange, primitive feel to them. My favorite is a piece that greets you
when you enter the Pierced Up tattoo parlor in Bristol. The wall
painting depicts giant wasps (with television sets strapped on as
additional weapons) divebombing a tempting bunch of flowers in a vase.
Parlor manager Maryanne Kemp recalls Banksy’s marathon painting session:
“It was an all-nighter.”
By 1999, he was headed to London. He was also beginning to retreat
into anonymity. Evading the authorities was one explanation—Banksy “has
issues with the cops.” But he also discovered that anonymity created its
own invaluable buzz. As his street art appeared in cities across
Britain, comparisons to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring began
circulating.
Banksy’s first London exhibition, so to speak, took place in
Rivington Street in 2001, when he and fellow street artists convened in a
tunnel near a pub. “We hung up some decorators’ signs nicked off a
building site,” he later wrote, “and painted the walls white wearing
overalls. We got the artwork up in 25 minutes and held an opening party
later that week with beers and some hip-hop pumping out of the back of a
Transit van. About 500 people turned up to an opening which had cost
almost nothing to set up.”
In July 2003, Banksy mounted “Turf War,” his breakthrough
exhibition. Staged in a former warehouse in Hackney, the show dazzled
the London art scene with its carnival-atmosphere display, which
featured a live heifer, its hide embellished with a portrait of Andy
Warhol, as well as Queen Elizabeth II in the guise of a chimpanzee.
Late that year, a tall, bearded figure in a dark overcoat, scarf and
floppy hat strolled into Tate Britain clutching a large paper bag. He
made his way to Room 7 on the second level. He then dug out his own
picture, an unsigned oil painting of a rural scene he had found in a
London street market. Across the canvas, which he had titled Crimewatch UK Has Ruined the Countryside for All of Us, he had stenciled blue-and-white police crime-scene tape.

2.20.2013

2.19.2013

2.18.2013

Saturday at Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, CA - Current Exhibits include Movie Costumes (surprisingly interesting), scrimshaw, Lucy (the rare and exciting 3.2 million year old in-tact primate) and Spirit Headhunters. This historical building is in the mission style...and three blocks from the Santa Ana Zoo. We stopped to have authentic Mexican food in between locations.In the above photo, Ethiopian coffee beans roasting.

Make merry at the
upcoming Lux@Night!
Don't miss the chance to view the remarkable cut, carved and etched work of
resident artist Carlos Vega
and the multi-media piece he completed during his stay here, The Flying Donkey.
Enjoy music by DJ
Jawsomo, dig into the bold Asian-inspired bbq ofthe Chop Soo-ey foodtruck
(a creation of famed SD chef Deborah Scott and the Cohn Restaurant Group),
and sip on Barefoot Wine,
Stone beer
and samples from SD-based Saylor's
Remedy Kombucha Tea. You can even check out the Artist
Residence, which will be open for viewing!

Also happening: the Lux store event, Alter & Adorn,
which offers a fun opportunity to collaborate with designers Housgoods, Tammy Spencer
and Archetype Z
on a customized piece of jewelry tailored to your preferences! Place a
custom order and get 10% off any other item in the store that night only;
15% if you're a Lux member.

It'll be a fun and festive evening, and we look forward to seeing you here
at Lux!

Sponsored by the County of San Diego at the recommendation of
former Supervisor Pam Slater-Price.

2.17.2013

A good toy...Said CCFC's Susan Linn: "a good toy is 90
percent child and 10 percent toy. A good toy just lies there until a
child invests it with life (and) meaning. A toy that is 90 percent child
encourages play that is driven by a child's interests, needs and
experiences" -- not by gendered marketing! read whole article

Using toys for both boys, girls may be good for kids

Find Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood on facebook ___________________________________________Romance in Marriage Esther Perel: The secret to desire in a long-term relationship

2.16.2013

2.15.2013

Zoologists watch as monkey midwife delivers baby

Human labor is long and difficult, so it's only
natural that someone be there to lend a helping hand — that's where the
midwife comes in. It's not the kind of thing that's typically observed
among other animals, however. Imagine the surprise of these zoologists
working in southwest China when they witnessed the birth of a black
snub-nose monkey whose delivery was assisted by a monkey midwife.
Normally,
these high-altitude monkeys give birth at night, and the whole thing
only takes about 10 to 15 minutes. Consequently, biologists have never
actually seen it happen with their own eyes. But recently, Wen Xiao of
Dali University in Yunnan and colleagues got lucky when they witnessed a
rare day time birth. Writing in New Scientist, Michael Marshall reports:

A
female monkey gave birth to her first infant within fifteen minutes
late one morning. While sitting in a rhododendron tree, she began
twisting her body and calling faintly. After 10 minutes she started
screaming, and then another female climbed up the tree. She was an
experienced mother, and sat beside the labouring female while the crown
of the infant's head appeared. Once the head was fully exposed, the
"midwife" pulled the baby out with both hands and ripped open the birth
membranes.
Within a minute, the mother had reclaimed the infant
from the midwife, severed the umbilical cord, and begun eating the
placenta. A few minutes later, the midwife went back down to the forest
floor to forage.
"This is a fairly rare observation," says Sarah
Turner of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who was not involved in
the Yunnan study. She says female monkeys often pull their babies out
themselves, and the midwife may have adapted this behaviour. "It's hard
to know what's going on in her head," says Turner, but it seems she was
genuinely helping.
That could be because female black snub-nosed
monkeys tend to stay in the group they were born in. As a result, the
females in a group are likely to be closely related and to have strong
social bonds. Animals often help their relatives because doing so
preserves their own genes, a phenomenon called kin selection.
The
juvenile females in the group watched the birth closely, and may have
picked up a few tips. Turner says many primates remain with their groups
while giving birth, giving juveniles a chance to learn.

Black
snub-nose monkeys are highly social primates who live in large
societies called bands. These bands, which can exceed 400 members, are
sub-divided into groups of 10, mostly consisting of one male and several
females. During this particular birth, two other females watched it
happen — undoubtedly taking mental notes.
More at New Scientist. The entire study can be found here.Images: Xi Xhinong.

2.14.2013

Most of What You Think You Know About Grammar is Wrong

And ending sentences with a preposition is nothing worth worrying about

By Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellarman

Illustration by Traci Daberko

Smithsonian magazine, February 2013

Going back to the roots of English grammar to uncover its many myths (Illustration by Traci Daberko)

You’ve probably heard the old story about the pedant who dared
to tinker with Winston Churchill’s writing because the great man had
ended a sentence with a preposition. Churchill’s scribbled response:
“This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.”It’s a great story, but it’s a myth. And so is that so-called grammar
rule about ending sentences with prepositions. If that previous
sentence bugs you, by the way, you’ve bought into another myth. No,
there’s nothing wrong with starting a sentence with a conjunction,
either. But perhaps the biggest grammar myth of all is the infamous
taboo against splitting an infinitive, as in “to boldly go.” The truth
is that you can’t split an infinitive: Since “to” isn’t part of the
infinitive, there’s nothing to split. Great writers—including Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Donne and Wordsworth—have been inserting adverbs between
“to” and infinitives since the 1200s.Where did these phony rules originate, and why do they persist?For some of them, we can blame misguided Latinists who tried to
impose the rules of their favorite language on English. Anglican bishop
Robert Lowth popularized the prohibition against ending a sentence with a
preposition in his 1762 book, A Short Introduction to English Grammar;
while Henry Alford, a dean of Canterbury Cathedral, was principally
responsible for the infinitive taboo, with his publication of A Plea for the Queen’s English in 1864.In Latin, sentences don’t end in prepositions, and an infinitive is
one word that can’t be divided. But in a Germanic language like English,
as linguists have pointed out, it’s perfectly normal to end a sentence
with a preposition and has been since Anglo-Saxon times. And in English,
an infinitive is also one word. The “to” is merely a prepositional
marker. That’s why it’s so natural to let English adverbs fall where
they may, sometimes between “to” and a verb.We can’t blame Latinists, however, for the false prohibition against
beginning a sentence with a conjunction, since the Romans did it too (Et tu, Brute?).
The linguist Arnold Zwicky has speculated that well-meaning English
teachers may have come up with this one to break students of incessantly
starting every sentence with “and.” The truth is that conjunctions are
legitimately used to join words, phrases, clauses, sentences—and even
paragraphs.Perhaps these “rules” persist because they are so easy to remember,
and the “errors” are so easy to spot. Ironically, this is a case where
the clueless guy who’s never heard of a preposition or a conjunction or
an infinitive is more likely to be right.As bloggers at Grammarphobia.com and former New York Times
editors, we’ve seen otherwise reasonable, highly educated people turn
their writing upside down to sidestep imaginary errors. There’s a simple
test that usually exposes a phony rule of grammar: If it makes your
English stilted and unnatural, it’s probably a fraud.We can’t end this without mentioning Raymond Chandler’s response when a copy editor at the Atlantic Monthly decided to “fix” his hard-boiled prose: “When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split.”